Once upon a time, war movies depicted American soldiers as brave, heroic and honorable and why not? The wars we were involved in were for the most part clearly defined from a moral standpoint. Then came Vietnam and everything changed.

Andre “Casper” Allen (Long) is “in country” and he’s not thrilled about it. Martin Luther King has just been assassinated back home and the civil rights movement is reaching a crescendo. Meanwhile he’s risking his life for a country where his people are hated, discriminated against, lynched and in general treated like second hand citizens. Even in Vietnam he’s called “Soul Man” by the locals who while they seem to be more accepting of him than his fellow Americans, are too busy trying to kill him for him to make friends.

He’s outspoken and opinionated which doesn’t endear him to his commanding officer, Lt. Sutton (Ewald) and he has to endure the racist taunts of Mississippi redneck Pvt. Meeks (Keohane) in the barracks. His platoon is being sent out into a largely hostile territory where unit 29 Bravo has disappeared and with whom all communication has been lost. They are being sent to sweep the area of Viet Cong and find the missing company, or their remains.

When his platoon gets into a firefight, four of the soldiers are pinned down – Casper, Meeks, and African-Americans Joe (Gutzmore) and Felix (Bailey) when Sutton bugs out to save his own neck, leaving the other four there to die. They fight their way out and go looking for Sutton – and it’s not to buy him an ice cream as Casper puts it. In the meantime, the four cut-off soldiers find the missing 29 Bravo and discover that their mission has devolved into killing every Vietnamese civilian possible whether they have any ties to the Viet Cong or not. Casper, who has become the quartet’s de facto leader, decides to take matters into his own hands which leads the group further and further down the rabbit hole.

=The morality of the Vietnam war is something America has been trying to come to grips with ever since we pulled out of Saigon, an act that is still hotly debated today. The soldiers who fought there are often caught in the middle; they were spat upon and despised by the left for even going to war and they were looked down upon and despised by the right for not winning it. Even today there’s a stigma associated with those who fought in the war, despite our rush to “support our troops” in the present day. The soldiers who served in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos don’t get the respect today that their peers who fought in other wars received and continue to receive.

We have to remember that a very large percentage of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam were basically teenage boys from poorer environments. This is a fact of the war that the movie fails to capture – most of the soldiers here seem to be older. The movie does capture the chaos of having leadership that was often self-contradictory and often did senseless things without explanation.

This is a very low budget indie. Do not expect to see battle sequences loaded with explosions and DolbyTM bullets whizzing through the air. Most of this is done with practical effects and it appears that the budget for fake blood was pretty low as well. Some war film buffs might find that disconcerting. The actors here are largely unknown and while they mostly acquit themselves well, some of the dialogue that they’re required to speak doesn’t sound much like how soldiers actually talk.

This isn’t a home run but it isn’t bad. There are a lot of good things going on here, not the least of which that we get a chance to examine our moral evaluations of the war – everyone above a certain age has one. I’m not going to say this is the war as soldiers experienced it but I think that it gets some of the confusion, the moral dilemmas and the chaos of the war. High kudos to the filmmakers for at least trying something different and succeeding enough of the time to make this a recommended rental.

REASONS TO SEE: The film gives a sense of the conflict that African-American soldiers went through.REASONS TO AVOID: Some of the dialogue is a bit on the clunky side.FAMILY VALUES: There is all sorts of salty language, racial epithets and war violence.TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Although this was the first American narrative production to shoot in Vietnam for a movie about the Vietnam War, some of the combat scenes were shot at Lee Ranch here in Orlando.BEYOND THE THEATERS: Amazon, Fandango Now, iTunes, VuduCRITICAL MASS: As of 2/20/19: Rotten Tomatoes: No score yet: Metacritic: No score yet.COMPARISON SHOPPING: PlatoonFINAL RATINGS: 6/10NEXT:Arctic

All is fair in love and war, but in war nothing is ever what it seems to be, particularly when the word “intelligence” is attached to it.

It is only months after 9-11 and the conflict in Afghanistan is just getting started. CIA agent Benjamin Keynes (Ball) is trying to find a cleric in the remote mountains of that country, ostensibly to get his blessings for the U.S. invasion to wipe out the Taliban. However, as Chief Warrant Officer Wally Tamer (Anderson) and his team of Sgt. Degetau (Huertas), Sgt. Trinoski (Williams), Sgt. Cole (Hunter), Sgt. Sadler (Prewett) and MSgt. Tanner (Taylor) discover, that was never their objective in the first place.

Apparently satellites have discovered a massive power surge in the mountains and the concern is that the Taliban has a super-weapon of some sort hidden away, and it’s their job to find it. With their native guide (Zinoune) leading the way they soon become hopelessly lost. That’s when the going gets strange.

Unexplainable noises and lights bedevil them. Phantom helicopters seem to be just over the next ridge but never appear. They are fired upon close by but when they arrive at the location that they were fired on from there’s no sign that there was anybody ever there. As ominous as these things are, things begin to get more dangerous – and more deadly. It soon becomes clear that Keynes knows far more than he’s telling them, and that they are up against an adversary that is beyond anything they have ever faced before.

Director Myrick was one of the guys responsible for The Blair Witch Project, and he brought along Williams who also starred in that movie. Like in his magnum opus, there is a low budget vibe here, a less-is-more style of filmmaking. Most of the tension is brought on by things off-camera, allowing the viewer’s imagination to take off with them.

He also utilizes a cast mainly of unknowns which has its plusses and minuses. On the plus side, you’re never distracted by famous faces. To the bad, the acting isn’t always top notch, although it is solid for the most part.

The problem here is the same one faced by our actual soldiers in Afghanistan; mostly we’re faced with a lot of scenes of soldiers marching around, going nowhere punctuated by scenes of sudden and extreme violence. It can be effective in places, but at times it feels like we’ve marched a long damn way to get there and our feet are starting to get tired.

Ball not only is the lead but he handles the voiceover narration as well (that sound you hear are mainstream critics cringing). He is tasked with playing a guy who holds everything inside, from information to emotions which can make it difficult for audiences to latch onto him as their proxy. He does as much as anybody could do I suppose, but still he remains difficult to really get to know throughout the movie and that was a bit bothersome to me as a viewer – although if Myrick was trying to get the audience to feel as in the dark as the soldiers, he succeeded.

There are a few optical effects near the end and it does get a little bit trippy, but on the whole this is a solid, tension-inducing sci-fi thriller. It got a laughable one-screen one day release on which it made $95, so I imagine they are hoping to make back their investment either in the DVD release or the cable run (which I understand is on Showtime at the moment). It’s really not too bad, but it is rather flawed – so be forewarned, at least more than the poor slobs who marched out to Afghanistan to find a cleric were.

WHY RENT THIS: A solid if unspectacular sci-fi horror film set in the Afghanistan war is at least somewhat unique.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: It is difficult to relate to the lead characters and despite some good action sequences, it’s mostly watching soldiers march in the desert.

FAMILY VALUES: There’s a whole lot of bad language, some violence and some disturbing visuals. I would feel okay with older teens watching this and maybe mature younger teens as well.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Michael C. Williams utters the same line in this movie (“Effing Savages”) as he does in Eduardo Sanchez’ 2006 horror movie Altered. Williams also starred in The Blair Witch Project which Myrick and Sanchez co-directed; whether or not the line of dialogue was an intentional link between the two films is unknown.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: An interview with Myrick at the Tribeca Film Festival is on the disk.

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $95 on an unreported production budget; I think it’s safe to say that it lost money on its theatrical run.